Hey, everyone. "Moriarty" here with some Rumblings From The Lab.
"Oh, god, not ANOTHER review for MOULIN ROUGE!! Please... no more about PEARL HARBOR!!"
Ordinarily, I'd agree with you, but I thought both of these pieces were perspectives we haven't heard yet, fresh takes on these two highly-debated pictures.
First up, we've got Maximillian DuPont, the alleged brother of Alexandra DuPont, our regular guest from DVD Journal.com. Either Alexandra's playing with us a la Andy Kaufman, or I've gotta spend a Thanksgiving at this family's table and listen to everyone cough up a thesaurus with attitude.
Once upon a time there was a boy who wanted to be a writer. So he moved to Paris, where he fell in with a bunch of wacky artist types. They beg him to complete the play they have been working on. But then he meets the actress who is going to be the star and falls instantly in love with her. Sadly for him, she is a courtesan, and the owner of the nightclub where they all want to put on the play needs her to go out with a duke, who will then finance this club. But the writer and the actress decide to have an affair anyway. Soon, the Duke finds out about this, and threatens to withdraw his support. He also threatens to kill the writer. In order to save his life, the actress tells the writer she must not see him again. His feelings are hurt. He confronts the actress at the opening night of his play. The Duke sends his assistant to shoot the writer. He misses. The actress reveals that she still loves the writer. Meanwhile, the consumption that has been bugging the actress all along finally kills her, as the curtain falls on a certain hit. Distraught, the writer goes home and writes a book about his experience.
That, in a baby talk nutshell, is the plot of Moulin Rouge. Moulin Rouge tells a simple story. Moulin Rouge tells it with very busy editing. Moulin Rouge is colorful and musical, with lots of singing and dancing. Moulin Rouge is the movie Joel Schumacher dreams of making when he falls to sleep at night.
The boy is played by Ewan McGregor but no one can pronounce his first name so they call him Christian. Christian has sharp teeth and a carefully collected set of hair strands that hang over his forehead fetchingly. The actress is named Satine, and is played by Nicole Kidman. Kidman has long legs and red hair and is suppose to be the sexiest woman in Paris but you could dab up all her sex appeal with the ragged end of a Charmin roll.
I'm a big fan of Kidman's, but in this film, she just ain't sexy. They have tried to make her a sexpot before, in Practical Magic and other films. But she is not a siren. She is the girl next door, with a practical, brainy head on her shoulders. Maybe you'd want to dress her up in bodices and stockings in private, but in public she is the determined helpmeet who can wield a gun, a hypo, and any other weapon at hand in movies such as Dead Calm. One of the reasons Malice was such a great movie was that it played on this aspect of her. The censorious, ball-busting good little wife turns out to be a femme fatale. It's hard to come up with an actress that the director could have come up with instead of Kidman. Kidman is no Ava Gardner, no Rita Hayworth. These were women. Kidman is a tomboy, a delicious one, but a tomboy nonetheless. And it seems that there aren't any women in Hollywood these days, just fembots, sex pistols, and anorexia-clinic refugees.
The movie is directed by Baz Luhrmann, who made the fey Strictly Ballroom and the loud and messy Romeo + Juliet. Moulin Rouge is just as loud, but a little less messy. Some shots are held for a full 100th of a nanosecond, so that you can actually see what is happening on the screen. One of the tricks of the film is that, A Knight's Tale-like, modern pop songs serve as the vocal interludes for the simplistic plot. They are mostly Elton John-McCartney-Police type songs, they kind that will make your parents feel all warm and fuzzy. Sometimes Luhrmann and his co-writer Craig Pearce are clever with the songs. They saw that McCartney's silly little lovesong song could be turned into a dialog, and that works OK. And McGregor does a fine rendition of the Elton John song for you song. But then they sing it again. And again. And again. This isn't a movie that progresses. It just goes round and round and round until you get dizzy and fall off.
Not only are the songs repetitious, but the choreography and camerawork are too. The lithe Kidman looks so good being lifted up in the air and falling back onto the hands of the chorus that Luhrmann has her do it a few more times. And he really, really likes having the camera travel magically toward Christian's garret and pass through the blades of a windmill. Actually pass through them. See, it happened! Here, I'll do it again. And again. And again.
Having sampled your mom's record collection, Luhrmann goes on to sample your sister's movie videos. He borrows from everything he can get his hands on, but mostly Titanic and Cabaret. The whole last sequence of the film has Christian stalked by a gun-wielding henceman--named Warner! But these aren't the only films that form the foundation for Luhrmann's. It turns out that all this time, The Rocky Horror Picture Show was actually the foundation for an school of aesthetics.
Strip away all the Cabaret and Cameron sampling, and what's left? It's difficult to say. Luhrmann has stripped his movie down so much that there is no room for subtext, theme, ideas. The supposed sensuality is left in a void, hanging above the audience like Kidman in her more elevated routines in the movie. And given that the songs are anachronistic, why should he bother to be accurate about Paris at the turn of the century, or about how nightclubs worked, or about historical figures such as Henri de Toulouse Lautrec (played by John Leguizamo, who acts more and more like Rosie Perez with each new film).
Moulin Rouge is a nerve-wrackingmelange of movies past, and movies even further back than that (but not John Huston's own Moulin Rouge, which Luhrmann seems never to have heard of). It all happens in a colorful rush, like looking through a kaleidoscope on a roller coaster. And in the end, the film doesn't even work on its own terms. This child's tale doesn't have heroes you can root for, girls to arouse you or make you fall in love, or a villain that is truly scary. This film could have done with a little more Mulan and a lot less rouge.
And then there's Santa. Yeah, it's that Santa. Kris Kringle. St. Nick. What of it? Right now, he's on an extended pub crawl in Dublin, and he was right pissed when he wandered into a screening of PEARL HARBOR, and I found the point of view of one of our first international spies to weigh in fascinating:
When I first heard about the concept for PEARL HARBOR I was gob- smacked by the sheer goddamn audacity of the idea: a historical romance set against the backdrop of a major maritime disaster. But whereas TITANIC had to kill off one of the leads to tug at the heartstrings, PEARL HARBOR can go one better - a love triangle. Sure, we know one of them’s gonna die, and very tragic it will be too… but then there’ll a SUPER-HAPPY REFLECTIVE ENDING in which the remaining couple pair off and gaze soulfully into each other’s eyes through the haze of Michael Bay’s garish camera filters.
However, I have to admire the man’s restraint in this regard. There are less filters, jump-cuts, sweeping crane-shots and slo-mo heroic- gay-subtext shots than BAD BOYS (ugh) THE ROCK (Mmm) of ARMAGEDDON (Bah!)… but it doesn’t change the fact that HE IS AN ADVERTISING DIRECTOR. Michael Bay sells you an IDEA, not necessarily a story. He acts as co-producer along with Jerry Bruckheimer, but I don’t reckon they’ll ever recapture the hey-day (if you can call it that) of the Simpson/Bruckheimer alliance. As god-awful as many of their films were, you couldn’t deny that Simpson had a passion for STORY… even if that passion lacked a certain degree of taste.
Bay and Bruckheimer just sell an IDEA of the story than anything else. Dashing illiterate pilot Ben Affleck and beautiful nurse Kate Beckinsdale meet and fall in love in the first hour amongst a series of disjointed flashbacks. There isn’t much in the way of saying WHY they fall in love. PEARL HARBOR gives you the conventions of a Bruckheimer romance and expects y’all to fall in line.
And probably, a lot of people will. The romance is sketchy, but by- and-large, it works. Just. The opening scene, which I felt sure I would DESPISE WITH ALL MY FIBRE, worked surprisingly well, though I wanted to see more of William Fitchner (sic). It sets up Affleck and Hartnett as long long-term buddies, even if their adult counterparts are only on screen for a few TOP GUN-related moments before Affleck dashes off to Englad to fight for the plucky Brits.
A couple of months later, he gets shot down. Back at Pearl Harbor, Beckinsdale and Hartnett try to move on with their lives and - surprise, surprise - fall in love. But (and this isn’t much of a spoiler if you’ve ever watched a film… ever) Affleck ISN’T DEAD (Da- da-DAAA!) and returns like the shadowy twin brother in a bad soap opera. He and Hartnett go through the obligatory bar-room brawl and collapse on the beach.
The night before the Attack.
Notice the capital ‘A’? THIS is what is going to draw the crowds in. This is what you wait over an hour for. This is what all the fuss is about. So is it worth it?
Pretty much so, yeah… I hate making another fatuous TITANIC reference, but the destruction of Pearl Harbor reminds my of the vertical White Star liner. It is damn spectacular, no doubts about that; enormous explosions, bullets singing underwater and strafing through drowning soldiers, (a la PRIVATE RYAN) gravity-defying plane crashes and a battleship doing a 180 degree barrel roll.
But it is the build-up, that few moments of calm before the storm, that is truly extraordinary.
The image of the Japanese planes sweeping low through the Hawaiian mountains is the most beautiful thing I’ve seen this year, certainly the most beautiful image to ever find its way into a Bruckheimer production. There’s this one bit where children stop playing and look up to see this plane slipping by, almost like a passing bus… The Japanese tail-gunner is waving frantically to them - maybe telling them to get the hell out of there, I don’t know. I hope so.
The trouble is, the film has to shift some major gears after the attack, and - to put it bluntly - it can’t. The people came to see Pearl Harbor get blown to beautifully-choreographed pieces and two hours later, that’s what they get. So what then?
Bruckheimer, Bay and Randal Wallace obviously felt the need to show America striking back, so they give us the Doolittle raid. There is a moment when Doolitle (Alec Baldwin) is explaining the relevance of this mission: if Pearl Harbor was a sledgehammer then this will be but a pinprick, but a "pinprick through the Japanese heart". I don’t know much about the American/Japanese war in the Pacific (though I had relatives fighting there) but I thought this was going to be an almighty fire-bombing of Tokyo. That they were going to slaughter all these civilians as retribution…. Which, while horrible in itself, would have fitted in nicely with the America-losing-its-innocence that seemed to be one of the films many themes.
But I digress. The Doolittle raid is - apart from being cringe- worthingly similar to TOP GUN - is a major anti-climax. All you can do is twiddle your thumbs and wonder whether it will be Affleck or Hartnett dies in some dumb-heroic way.
PEARL HARBOR is a big dumb blockbuster with slivers of historical accuracy running through it. It was never meant to be the other way around. Hans Zimmer’s score is MAJORLY overused and Affleck looks insufferably smug for the whole thing. The terrible beauty of the Pearl Harbor attack just about balances the flaws which dominate the last hour (but I suppose you don’t have to hang around for that) There is less of the jingoistic, flag-waving bullshit that you’d expect, but not an awful lot.
A good deal of the people at that screening yesterday seemed to HATE this film… they smiled to the PR people and started cursing when they stepped outside the door. I’m kinda’ ambivalent about it. I was entertained for about two hours (shame it’s over three hours long) and it was certainly something that could only have been seen on the biggest of big screens… but then, I didn’t pay money for it. The rest of you cinema-going schlubs might not be so easily placated…
Anyhow, stay frosty
Santa
